Tuesday, December 07, 2004

Captain America Collectors' Preview #1 - The Case of the Hollow Men

This 13 page Simon&Kirby story is reprinted from the 1941 debut issue of ALL-WINNERS COMICS, the only time the story has been reprinted (there's also an S&K Cap story in #2 that has never been reprinted. It would be great to see a volume of all the Kirby golden age Marvel art not from CAPTAIN AMERICA. It would only be a bit over 200 pages).

In this story, the Lord of Death, on orders from Hitler, changes Bowery bums to Zombies ("Zombies Bucky! They're Zombies!") and sets them loose to sabotage ships bound for England on the Lease-Lend programs.

Cap and Bucky go undercover to take care of it, and the story has Bucky giving Hitler a raspberry. No wonder Zemo was so determined to get the kid.

A fun sample of the early S&K work, with really sharp restored art. Great zombies on the rampage on several pages. As Greg Theakston mentions in his introduction, there are various hands involved on various pages, but several of the action oriented pages are pure S&K.

The other interesting piece of Kirby art in here is a re-design of Cap that, according to Theakston's caption was found in Kirby's home, with Kirby having no memory of when or why it was done.

Most of this book promotes various then-contemporary Cap related books, but also noteworthy in this issue are the features on Joe Simon, featuring several photos and samples of his paintings (some of which seem to be using Bill Clinton as a model for Cap), as well as the new cover by Simon, and a page by Fred Hembeck.